That’s not the only subscription coming up though. Now Facebook is considering adding an ad-free subscription option. These rumors have come and gone in the past, with no sign of change in the company’s resolute focus on advertising as its core business model. Post-Cambridge Analytica and post-GDPR though, it seems the company’s position is more malleable, and could be following the plan laid out by my colleague Josh Constine recently. He pegged the potential cost at $11 a month, given the company’s revenue per user.

I’m an emphatic champ of subscription models, particularly in media. Subscriptions align incentives in a way that ad can never do, while also avoiding the morass of privacy and ethics that beset ad targeting. Subscription revenues are also more reliable than ad dollars, making it easier to budget and improve operational efficiency for an organization.

Incentive alignment is one thing, and my billfold is another. All of these subscriptions are starting to add up. These days, my media subscriptions are hovering around $80 a month, and I don’t even have Tv. Storage costs for Google, Apple, and Dropbox are another $13 a month. Cable and cell service are another $200 a month combined. Software subscriptions are probably about $20 a month( although so many are annualized its hard to keep track of them ). Amazon Prime and a few others total in around $25 a month.

I’m frustrated with this hell. I’m frustrated that the web’s promise of instant and free access to the world’s datum appears to be dying. I’m frustrated that subscription usually entails merely putting formerly free content behind a paywall. I’m frustrated that the price for subscriptions seems wildly high compared to the ad dollars that the fees substitute for. And I’m frustrated that subscription pricing rarely seems to account for other subscriptions I have, even when content libraries are similar.

Subscriptions can be a great tool, but everyone seems to be doing them wrong. We need to transform our thinking here if we are to move on from the manacles of the ad networks.

Before we dive in though, let’s are aware of: the web needs a business model. We didn’t need paywalls on the early web because we focused on plain text from other users. Plain text is easier to produce, lowering the friction for people to contribute, and it’s also cheaper to store and transmit, lowering the cost of bandwidth.

Today’s customers though have significantly higher criteria than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. That “quality” expenses enormous sums in engineering and design talent , not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs.

Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total warhead of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000 x the data utilization of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis. Yet, all of our research depicts people want high-definition images with their narratives, instant loading of articles on the site, and interactivity. Those features have to be paid somehow, begetting us the advertising and subscription models we see today.

The other cost is content production itself. Volunteers simply haven’t produced the information we are seeking. Wikipedia is an extraordinary resource, but its depth falterings when we start looking for information about our local communities, or news, or individuals who aren’t famous. The reality is that information gathering is hard work, and in a capitalist system, we need to compensate people to do it. My colleagues and I are passionate about startups and technology, but we need to eat to publish.

While an open, free, and democratized web is ideal, these two challenges demonstrate that a business model had to be attached to make it function. Advertising is one such model, with massive privacy violations required to optimize it. The other approach is charging for access.

Unfortunately, subscription seems to be an region filled with product technologists and marketers led by brain-dead executives. The default selection of Bloomberg this week and so many other publications is to simply put formerly free content behind a paywall. No consumer wants to pay for something they formerly get for free, and yet we repeatedly assure examples of subscriptions designed this way.

I don’t know when media started hiring IRS accountants, but subscriptions should be seen as an upgrade , not a taxation. A subscription should provide new features, content, and capabilities that didn’t exist before while maintaining the former product that consumers have enjoyed for years.

Take MoviePass for instance. Consumers can continue to watch movies as they always have in the past, but now they have a new subscription option to watch potentially more movies for a situated cost. Among my friends, MoviePass has totally changed the way they think of cinemas. Instead of just seeing one blockbuster every month, they are heading to an art house movie because “we’ve essentially already paid for it, so why not try it? ” The pricing is clearly too inexpensive, but that shouldn’t confuse from a product that offered a completely new experience from a subscription.

The hell is even worse though. We not only get paywalls where none existed before, but the prices of those subscriptions are always vastly more expensive than customers ever wanted. It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments show, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software( which I might add, is altogether hosted on iCloud infrastructure ).

For product marketers, the default mentality is to extract a lot of value from the 1% of readers or users that are going to convert to paid. Subscriptions are always positioned as all-or-nothing, with limited metering or tiering, to try to force the conversion. To my mind though, the question is not how to get 1% of readers to pay an exorbitant cost, but how to get tell 20% of your readers to pay you a cheaper cost. It’s not about exclusion, but about participation.

One way we could fix that situation would be to allow subscriptions to combine together more cheaply. We are starting to see this too: Spotify, Hulu, and Scribd appear to be investigating a deal in which consumers can get a joint subscription from these services for a lower rate. Setapp is a set of more than one hundred OS X apps that come bundled for about $10 a month.

I’d love to see more of these partnerships, because they are much more fair to the consumer and ultimately allow smaller subscription companies to compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, and others. Cross-marketing lowers subscriber acquisition expenses, and those savings should ultimately stream down to the consumer.

Subscription hell is real, but that doesn’t mean the business model is flawed. Rather, we need to completely transform our thinking around these models, including the marketing behind them and the features that they offer. We also need to consider consumers and their billfolds more holistically, since no one buys a subscription in a vacuum. For too long, paywall playbooks has only been recently copied rather than innovated upon. It’s time for product leaders to step up and build a better future.